"Our Silver City feels full of hope, vitality, energy and creative spark, and doesn’t take itself too seriously, however real the approaching calamity.", ★★★★ Adrian Searle, The Guardian
"A profound exhibition", Amrit Doll, ArtReview
Our Silver City travels to the end of this century, featuring works from the last 400 million years. It is an exhibition-as-sci-fi-novel, or vice-versa.
Crossing the gallery threshold, we step into a possible future world. This world has been reshaped by decades of crisis and collapse: resource wars and evacuations, plastic-eating bacteria and flooding. Once known as Nottingham, the Silver City is set against a backdrop of fire seasons and widening waterways. Here, communities have embraced different forms of colour production, weather forecasting and spirituality.
This exhibition is imagined as a journey unfolding across four galleries, orientated to the cardinal points. It traces a route from change to understanding, from inner knowledge to wisdom. Along the way, we encounter a selection of artefacts, remnants and artworks connecting the long 21st century with what went before. All exhibitions invite us to travel in time, but this one insists on it.
Based on a methodology by Prem Krishnamurthy, Our Silver City has been developed by the artists Céline Condorelli, Femke Herregraven and Grace Ndiritu, and the novelist Liz Jensen, in close dialogue with Krishnamurthy and the Nottingham Contemporary team. It is accompanied by a novella by Jensen, and extends across the city via a programme developed with young people.
Our Silver City asks: How might art envision, prototype and practice new ways of being in the uncertain future? Who were “we” before we became “we”? Where are we going? And how might we get there?